


love in the time of köttbullar

by yamabato



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: IKEA, Love Confessions, M/M, meatballs: consumed, miya atsumu: clowned, swedish language: butchered
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24728449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yamabato/pseuds/yamabato
Summary: Shouyou sets the bowl on the tiny table with a flourish and anitadakimasu!and this is when it hits Atsumu harder than a Skurup to the temple:He wants this. Shouyou, hip cocked against the miniature kitchen countertop, smiling shyly up at Atsumu through the amber fan of his lashes, beautiful god-boy-man somehow glowing gold even under the buzzy LED lighting. Though they’re standing in a 430,000 square foot warehouse in Tsurumachi, Atsumu’s looking at Shouyou, and he’s home.Amid the Flärdfull and the Smörboll, Miya Atsumu falls a little more in love.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Comments: 91
Kudos: 566





	love in the time of köttbullar

_You can do everything yourself, but you don’t have to._

_-IKEA website_

It takes Atsumu three months and two extremely ill-advised dates with Sakusa Kiyoomi before he musters the courage to corner Hinata Shouyou in the Black Jackals locker room and ask him out for coffee.

Atsumu spends the first couple of months waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the universe to say _Oops, actually, this was a clerical oversight, and Hinata Shouyou at least deserves a boyfriend who doesn’t sulk and boast and purposefully buy the wrong brand of laundry detergent just to start an argument, don’t you think? Maybe he deserves someone like...oh, I don't know, Kageyama Tobio? Did you ever think about that?_

But Shouyou doesn't waver (and Atsumu is an asshole for entertaining the thought that he would do such a thing, truly) and sure, they cry and argue and barely make it through all of the growing pains that come along with opening up your life to fit a new person, but they do make it.

His teammates, who have long since acclimated themselves to whatever particular brand of asshole Atsumu is making out of himself on any particular day, are wholly unsurprised by the news. Sakusa Kiyoomi—who was likely not aware in the slightest that he had ever gone on one date with Atsumu, let alone two—squeezes a puff of disinfectant over the top of Atsumu and Shouyou’s scarlet faces and announces, with no inflection whatsoever: _Mazel tov. Please keep your bodily fluids out of the locker room._ Bokuto smacks loud kisses on both of their foreheads like a drunk uncle. 

Osamu laughs and laughs and laughs until Atsumu nearly breaks his finger on the End Call button and hurls his phone across the room. But later, Osamu sends a text: _Happy for ya._

Then: _Suna’s collecting bets for the breakup._

No one bets on Atsumu.

**life at home**

Atsumu quickly becomes intimately acquainted with the spare and serene confines of his boyfriend’s tiny studio apartment, where he lingers like the smoke from Shouyou’s nag champa incense except even more clingy and cloying. Mostly because Atsumu’s own apartment had suffered for years through the highs and lows (mostly lows) of its occupants, and though Osamu had long since moved out in favor of a rice-scented bachelor pad above Onigiri Miya, his presence still hung heavy over the place. Mostly in the battered cabinets, cluttered with chipped mugs that said things like I’m the Uglier Twin and Volleyball Grandma and I Heart Hyogo, and in the shoddy patching of the drywall lining the hallways, and in Atsumu’s overflowing, mostly-stolen-from-Osamu wardrobe, and—well. Everywhere. The point was, the apartment was cursed and also probably hazardous to Atsumu’s health, and he would not taint Shouyou with whatever asshole miasma Osamu left lingering in the air when he abandoned his twin for Tokyo.

So when Shouyou hesitantly informed Atsumu that his apartment building would be torn down at the end of the spring, and would Atsumu maybe like to look at new places together, perhaps somewhere a little closer to the gym, or a small balcony might be nice—Atsumu jumped. He fucking leapt.

And now it’s spring, and the ink is barely dry on their joint lease (!) for a spacious one-bedroom (!!) in Hirakata City, and Shouyou’s hand is covering Atsumu’s where it’s resting on the gearshift in the car that they borrowed from Sakusa (?!) as they make their winding way to IKEA, and it’s looking like everything is coming up Atsumu.

There’s just one thing.

And, okay, hear him out, he knows that this is childish and stupid, but Atsumu is a childish and stupid person, whatever, he’s big enough to admit that. The minuscule sliver of his brain that is quiet and logical says: _idiot, of course he loves you, he just signed a lease with you._ It is promptly drowned out by the loud, big lovestruck moron part of his brain that howls: _I WANT HIM TO SAY 'I LOVE YOU.' I WANT A BIG FUCKIN’ TAYLOR SWIFT CONFESSION. FUCK._

But instead, he just rubs his thumb over the thick calloused hills of Shouyou’s palm and basks in the wide white grin that his boyfriend flashes at him from the passenger seat.

“Remember, I want to buy one of those cloud lamps,” Shouyou says, and leans forward in his seat as the enormous blue-and-yellow building looms on the horizon. Atsumu vows to buy every fucking cloud lamp he can get his hands on, and God help anyone who tries to stop him.

At Sakusa’s request, Atsumu parks in a far-flung corner of the lot, well away from the rest of humanity. Shouyou swings their joined hands together, humming happily under the golden morning sunlight and the wide blue sky, and Atsumu’s heart and stomach begin warming up their floor routine for the Tokyo Olympics. He swallows hard, adjusts his baseball cap with his free hand, and thinks of the text he’d gotten from Sakusa that morning: _Don’t propose over the meatballs._

Then: _Fuck. Atsumu, don’t propose._

**housewares**

Shouyou drops Atsumu’s hand to snatch up a catalog and a matching set of Fraktas. They pore over the tidy photos in the thick tome for a moment in the entryway, but it seems like Shouyou already knows exactly what he wants and where to find it, and God knows Atsumu does too, except he isn’t here for the Swedish ingenuity.

They pick their way through the kitchenware, and Shouyou dutifully tucks some measuring cups and drinking glasses into his bag while Atsumu swats his ass with a Gubbröra and shamefully stuffs his own bag with a package of fox-printed dishtowels that are definitely not for Osamu.

They talk, too, and it’s easy and comfortable in a way that Atsumu never would have dreamed of all those years ago, glaring down at the top of Shouyou’s sweaty head from the other side of the net and feeling something raw and nauseating slice through his guts and spill them all over the gymnasium floor.

 _Atsumu,_ older-Atsumu would have lectured his younger, dumber self, _that’s love, and buckle the fuck up, because this kid is going to take your guts and drag them across the ocean and you will feel it aching for years and years. But then, he comes back, and he drags your guts back along with him, and guess what? Now he likes you back. He might even love you back._

So this brings him back to the love problem, which he ponders as Shouyou runs his hands over a couple of candy-pink Flodalens. It probably would be fine if Atsumu just turned to him on the sofa tonight and said it. Or later, legs tangled together in the sheets, he could whisper it into that soft and shivery patch of skin between Shouyou’s shoulder and neck. That might be nice. Or he could wait until their next day off, splash out for kaiseki and a private room, maybe, and say it then. That would be fine, too.

He thinks of the text he’d gotten from Bokuto that morning: _tsum tsum, i think ur overthinking this, man._

Then: _please don’t propose!!!!!!!!_

Then: _can u sneak me some meatballs. (don’t tell keiji)_

**lighting**

“I’m keeping the Volleyball Grandma mug.”

“What? Oh. Okay.”

Shouyou pauses in the entrance to the lighting section to take it all in, and the glow of the Grimsås above his head catches in the red threads of his hair and makes an honest-to-God golden halo that would bring a lesser man to his knees. Atsumu’s stomach does a round off triple back handspring and crashes into the towering display of environmentally responsible light bulbs.

He recovers by planting a hand atop Shouyou’s head and shoving him down to stretch obnoxiously toward a pair of Upplysts on the topmost shelf. Shouyou squawks at the injustice, Atsumu preens as heads turn to gawk at all 187 centimeters of him, pretends not to hear the whispers of _Isn’t that Miya Atsumu from the MSBY Black Jackals? The one who slipped and broke his ass on Fan Day?_

So, adorable cloud lamps secured, they slow to a stroll through the twinkling rows of Regolits and Flugbos and Misterhults, and Atsumu grapples with the notion that he might actually be a giant fucking sap because everything just looks dim compared to Shouyou.

He’s thinking about the half-dead houseplants lining the windowsill of his garbage hole of an apartment and how they’d miraculously been coaxed back to life as soon as Atsumu and Shouyou started dating, seemingly photosynthesizing the pure sunlight of Shouyou’s presence and a little off-key humming and, okay, actually watering the damn things once in a while. Osamu would typically punch Atsumu in the shoulder, here, and tell him that he’s being a revolting corny bastard. He’d be right.

The beautiful thing about Shouyou, Atsumu thinks, is that he doesn’t really get any of this. He is happy to be surrounded at all times by the people that he loves and who love him in return. That is plenty for him. What he doesn’t realize is that all of these people are caught in orbit around him, the sun, drawn by the all-consuming and inexplicable gravitational pull of being loved by Hinata Shouyou. If Atsumu were to extend this shitty metaphor a bit more—blame the Pjätteryd he’s staring at on the wall, depicting a smiling solar system—he hopes one day he’ll be Mercury. Maybe he already is.

Atsumu is arriving at a point, here: Shouyou emits his own light. Atsumu is smart enough to realize how lucky he is to be able to bask in it.

**the showroom**

They make the climb to the showroom on the second floor, which always makes Atsumu think of that one American rom-com that he totally did not watch with Bokuto while clutching each other and intermittently weeping. But Shouyou, omniscient little ball of pure joy that he is, just says “Oh! It’s like that movie!” and closes strong fingers around the sleeve of Atsumu’s jacket, dragging him along toward the sofas.

Atsumu loves him. He doesn’t know when he should say it.

It’s easy enough to avoid the urge on the Stocksund (too small), and the Bråthult (too red), and the Delaktig (what the hell), but what about the Lindome? Velvet is kind of romantic, right? Shouyou stretches out like a cat on the Grönlid’s chaise and Atsumu sits next to him, tucks his hands underneath his thighs to fight the overwhelming urge to reach over Shouyou’s head, grab a Förslag and put himself out of his misery.

But before he can turn the sensibly-priced blade upon himself, Shouyou wisely decides that neither of them are at a place in their lives where they can take responsibility for a white sofa. Atsumu suddenly finds himself sinking into the cushions of the Karlstad, drapes an arm over the back of the sofa as Shouyou flops next to him and butts his head lightly against the bone of Atsumu’s shoulder.

Maybe it should happen like this:

They’ll lug the three flat-packed boxes of the Karlstad up the narrow stairs to their apartment, and Atsumu will not break a sweat because he is a professional athlete who has never skipped leg day in his life, and Shouyou will make the whole thing look easy while he’s laughing the whole way up the stairs and perhaps feeding his ego with a _So strong, Atsumu-san!_

They’ll puzzle out the instructions over two cans of Asahi Super Dry, and Shouyou will hop up onto the kitchen counter and read aloud from the English and Portuguese versions while Atsumu channels his feelings of inadequacy into Allen wrenching the shit out of any scrap of particle board that looks at him funny. It will take hours and two more cans of Asahi Super Dry and a brief interlude for a dance party to Atsumu’s Caucasian Frat Boy playlist that devolves into rolling around and making out on top of Karlstad Box #3.

But they’ll finish it, and Atsumu will sit thigh-to-glorious-thigh with the actual love of his life in their new apartment on their new Karlstad. And he’ll kiss Shouyou again, then, press him into the cushions just to hear him gasp and sigh, tangle his fingers into a handful of fiery red hair and he’ll whisper _I love you, Shouyou_ as he slots their hips together and—

“Atsumu-san, are you all right? You’re making a weird face. Weirder than usual.”

There’s a record scratch as Shouyou touches Atsumu’s elbow, yanking him out of the stratosphere and back to where he’s sitting on a Karlstad in an IKEA in Tsurumachi. Atsumu uses his free hand to strategically place a Skärvfrö over his crotch.

“I’m fine, just thinkin’. I like this one,” he says, and Shouyou smiles and says that he does too, so Atsumu dutifully snaps a picture of the tag and heaves himself to his feet.

Next Shouyou tugs Atsumu into the miniature apartment display, which was not built to accommodate one Japanese person of average proportions, let alone two Dorito-shaped professional volleyball players, and Atsumu promptly brains himself on a low-hanging light fixture while Shouyou attempts to arrange plastic fruit in a Trygg and knocks them all over the countertop in the process.

Shouyou sets the bowl on the tiny table with a flourish and an _itadakimasu!_ and this is when it hits Atsumu harder than a Skurup to the temple:

He wants this. Shouyou, hip cocked against the miniature kitchen countertop, smiling shyly up at Atsumu through the amber fan of his lashes, beautiful god-boy-man somehow glowing gold even under the buzzy LED lighting. Though they’re standing in a 430,000 square foot warehouse in Tsurumachi, Atsumu’s looking at Shouyou, and he’s home.

Atsumu kisses him, then, plants his palms on the Pinnarp on either side of Shouyou to trap him there, and kisses him and kisses him until someone’s knees hit the edge of the twin-size Malm and the world is suddenly horizontal and Shouyou’s laughing into his mouth, a shot of pure sunny oxygen straight into Atsumu’s lungs and he is dizzy with it.

“Shouyou-kun,” Atsumu gasps, and it’s already wrong, it’s so fucking wrong, he should have done this on the Snefjord or the Hemnes or anything but the Malm, really what the _fuck_ was he thinking—

Shouyou rolls onto his side to beam at him, slides his hand over Atsumu’s sweating palm and twines their fingers together. “Hi,” he says softly, and Atsumu has to squeeze his eyes shut as his heart donkey kicks his ribcage into the exposed ceiling beams.

“I love you.”

His eyes snap open just in time to see Shouyou’s grin soften into something tentative and confused, lips parting slightly; watches the smooth plane of his brow furrow as his eyebrows knit together. They’re lying so close like this that Atsumu can feel the sharp little intake of breath that Shouyou sucks between his teeth.

They stare at each other for a long moment, and the Malm is an island adrift in the river of endless IKEA customers surrounding them, and Atsumu wants to hurl himself into it and let the throngs of sensibly-sneakered tourists grind him into a fine dust beneath them. Let his tortured soul roam the pathways of IKEA for eternity. Osamu, Nitori-loving bastard that he is, would never come to find him.

Then Shouyou’s face suddenly clears, like the sun reappearing behind a cloud or someone aiming their Fryele straight into your eyes, and he laughs again, quick and bright. Atsumu rolls over onto his back. The opening notes to a Taylor Swift song drift down from somewhere in the ceiling and wash over his burning face.

“Atsumu-san!” he exclaims, and the bed frame creaks with the force of his laughter. “Now?”

Atsumu knows that if he looked into Shouyou’s eyes right now, he’d find them soft and fond and gleaming and trained singularly on him. He _knows_ that everything is, technically, fine. Nothing monumental has occurred apart from the words that just fell out of his mouth and are now lying heavy and undetonated on the patterned Skogsfibbla between them.

“Yeah. Now.” Atsumu grits out around the cottony lump in his throat, wrenches his head to the side to be baptized under the warm glow of Shouyou’s brown eyes and scrunched nose and toothy smile. Shouyou’s smaller hand squeezes Atsumu’s once, hard.

But he doesn’t say it back. He doesn’t say it back.

**self-serve**

He hasn’t said it back yet. He hasn’t said it back yet. He hasn’t said it—fuck.

“Fuck!”

Karlstad Box #2 slips off of the unwieldy cart-scooter-thing and probably crushes at least three of Atsumu’s toes. Who cares. Honestly, he can’t feel it. He’s numb. Existence is pain.

Shouyou hasn’t said it back yet.

He hasn’t said it back yet. He hasn’t said it back yet.

**meatballs**

By the time they wander into the food court, Atsumu’s mood is blacker than the Black Forest cake gleaming in the dessert case. He’s jammed both of his hands deep into his jacket pockets, but Shouyou’s wormed a hand in alongside his clenched fist, fingers dancing lightly over his knuckles. He’s still smiling faintly, and his eyes are still warm and soft when Atsumu sneaks a glance at him under the brim of his baseball cap, which he’s tilted low on his head for maximum sulkage.

So Shouyou doesn’t love him back. ( _Yet,_ the hopeful part of his brain supplies.) So what? This is, unsurprisingly, not Atsumu’s first time at this particular rodeo.

Atsumu makes several promises to himself as he jabs a Tillämpad into a heaping platter of Swedish meatballs. One: Osamu can never learn what happened here today. Atsumu still hasn’t lived down the residual shame from The Kita-san Incident, which was in fucking high school, by the way, nor is he strong enough to reflect upon said incident while Shouyou is pressed close next to him, pink tongue caught between his teeth in concentration while he balances a second plate of Swedish delicacies on his forearm.

Two: They will have an adult conversation. He will buy Shouyou a bouquet, and they will sit down and clasp their hands together and Atsumu will lay out his grandiose plans for the rest of their lives together, which he should probably get started on, because right now they consist of tossing a endless volleyballs and building a sofa and then having exuberant, athletic sex on said sofa and not much beyond that.

Three: He’ll wing it, whatever.

They sit down, and Shouyou props an elbow on the table, tips his head into his palm. He’s half-hiding his grin in his hand.

“All right, Atsumu-san. Are you finished with your pouting?”

Atsumu, who is not even close to being finished with his pouting, splutters indignantly. “I’m not— I am _not_ — _pouting—!_ ”

Shouyou pops a meatball into his mouth, stares out of the window into the parking lot while he chews. When his eyes return to Atsumu’s, they’re impossibly wide, impossibly deep. There’s a thread of a laugh in his voice when he speaks.

“I love you too, Atsumu-san. Of course I do. I’ve loved you for a long time.”

Which is lamer: accidentally inhaling a Swedish meatball due to your boyfriend’s love confession, or blaming the tears in your eyes on said meatball instead of, you know, the other thing?

Well, it actually doesn’t matter, because Atsumu does both at once.

So they’re grinning dopey grins at each other over plates of meatballs, and Atsumu’s heart decides to return from its extended vacation amidst IKEA’s ceiling ductwork, and he thinks: I want to marry him. I want to marry him right here in this IKEA.

The 47 text messages in his pocket say: _no, Atsumu, you’ve already well exceeded your daily quota for making an ass out of yourself, let’s leave this one to simmer for a while._ But the big, dumb, loud, in-mutual-love-with-the-man-of-my-dreams part of his brain screams: _TAYLOR SWIFT IS PLAYING OVER THE LOUDSPEAKER AND I WANT TO MARRY HINATA SHOUYOU RIGHT NOW. IN THIS IKEA. PASS THE FUCKING MEATBALLS._

Atsumu doesn’t propose. But he does save some meatballs for Bokuto.

**Author's Note:**

> i was innocently browsing the ikea website at 2 AM when this fic sprang fully formed from my head like a magnificent pegasus. i would like to apologize to sweden for butchering their beautiful language and also to atsumu for clowning him but also this is based on my own personal life experience where i have a crippling existential crisis every time i step into the ikea showroom. i do not know why. maybe it’s all of the throw pillows. anyway, the real clown here...is me. also all of my targeted ads are now in swedish so there are actually two clowns and they're both me.
> 
> i’m lindsay! this is the first fic i've written in over 8 years. i laughed a lot while writing it which felt nice. i recently remade [my twitter](https://twitter.com/yamabato) and i’d love to talk to you there. because i adore you. take care!


End file.
